Low‐grade two‐dimensionalism

Abstract

As tends to be the way with philosophical positions, there are at least as many two-dimensionalisms as there are two-dimensionalists. But painting with a broad brush, there are core epistemological and metaphysical commitments which underlie the two-dimensionalist project, commitments for which I have no sympathies. A sketch of three significant points of disagreement: 1. Two-dimensionalists often rely on the assumption that “a posteriori information only tells us about our world ” (Chalmers (1996), 137). This assumption backs their rejection of what Chalmers calls “strong metaphysical necessities”, since such necessities would be forever beyond our epistemic reach. But I see no reason to accept this epistemological constraint, and much reason to reject it. Not only are there, as Soames notes 1, cases in which non-modal a posteriori knowledge combines with conditional a priori modal knowledge to yield, a posteriori, previously-unavailable categorical modal knowledge, but it seems to me that there are numerous cases in which ordinary epistemic procedures straightforwardly deliver modal information. Examining a table can reveal nonmodal properties such as its shape and material composition, modally-inflected dispositional properties, and fully modal properties such as the facts that it could be taken through that doorway, that it wouldn’t break if a book were placed on it, or that it could have been painted red. I find plausible the stronger view that in many cases, this modal information is part of the content of perceptual states – an essential aspect of a perceptual space seems to me to be the presentation of the possibility of acts and events at locations – but the weaker claim that some stage of the epistemic process yields novel modal information suffices to reject this aspect of two-dimensionalism. The central point here is that the two-dimensionalist separation of information about our world and not about our world misplaces

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